The present invention relates in general to cryptography and secure communication via computer networks or via other types of systems and devices, and more particularly to an improved method of implementation of public-key cryptography.
A user of a public-key cryptography based communication system communicates with another user by means of two different keys, a public key and a private key. A user's public key and private key form a public key/private key pair. A message sender communicates securely with a message recipient by encrypting a message using the recipient's public key. The sender then sends the message to the recipient who decrypts the message using the recipient's private key.
The security of messages sent to a user of a public-key based cryptography system depends on the security of the user's private key. Although the user's public key is freely available to other users, the user keeps its private key secret and known only to those privileged to receive messages sent to the user.
The implementation of public key cryptography requires an “infrastructure” to manage requirements such as key distribution and to certify for key validity. Before encrypting a message to a recipient, a message sender must have access to the recipient's public key. The sender must also confirm that this key is valid and not compromised.
In public-key cryptography systems, a trusted third party—the “certification authority” (CA) may perform functions such as key distribution and certification. Typically, the CA issues a “certificate” for each of its client users together with the CA's electronic signature to confirm the validity of the certificate. The certificate securely binds together several quantities. Usually, the certificate includes parameters such as the name of the client and the client's public key. Parameters such as the certificate's issue date and expiration date also may be included. By issuing a client's certificate, the CA attests that the associated public key is authentic and corresponds to the particular user for the validity period of the certificate.
Circumstances may require the revocation of a client's certificate before its intended expiration date. For example, revocation may be necessary if another party compromises the client's private key. Alternatively, the client may no longer be entitled to use the public key. If a certificate is revocable, then other users cannot rely on that certificate unless the CA distributes certification status information indicating that a certificate is currently valid. Such information must be up to date and distributed to all relying parties. Distributing such large amounts of information requires significant resources on the part of the CA and is a barrier to the widespread implementation of public-key cryptography.
The most well known—but inefficient—public-key infrastructure (PKI) proposal to address the key revocation issue is a certification revocation list (CRL). A CRL is a list of certificates revoked before their intended expiration date. The CA issues this list periodically together with its signature to confirm the validity of the CRL. Since the CA may revoke many certificates before their intended expiration date, the CRL may become very long, particularly if the CA has many clients. Each party requesting a certificate status check receives this list. Refinements to this approach require transmission of only those certificates revoked since the CA's last update. However, the transmission and infrastructure costs are still high.
An alternative proposal is the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). In this protocol, any user can query the CA as to the status of any client of the CA, including the validity of the client's public key. The CA responds to each query by generating a fresh signature on the certificate's current status. This proposal reduces transmission costs to a single signature per query. However, computation costs increase because a fresh signature is required in response to every query. Security also decreases because, if the CA is centralized, it becomes more vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
A more promising protocol is the Micali “Novomodo” system. (S. Micali, Efficient Certificate Revocation, Proceedings of RSA Data Security Conference 1997; S. Micali, Novomodo: Scalable Certificate Validation and Simplified PKI Management, PKI Research Workshop, 2002.) The Novomodo system involves a CA, one or more directories to distribute certificate information, and the users. However, it achieves better efficiency than CRLs and OCSP, without sacrifices in security. The advantage of Novomodo over a CRL-based system is that a directory's response to a certificate status query is concise compared to a CRL protocol whereas the length of a CRL grows with the number of certificates revoked. Novomodo has several advantages over OCSP. First, the CA's computational load is much lower. Second, unlike the distributed components of an OCSP, the directories in Novomodo need not be trusted. Third, Novomodo is less susceptible to DoS attacks. Finally, although the directory-to-user communication costs of OCSP are low, Novomodo's are typically even lower. However, Novomodo still requires certification status queries.
Many refinements to protocols involving certificate status queries attempt to reduce PKI computation and transmission requirements and offer a variety of tradeoffs. However, there are several reasons for eliminating, or at least reducing, certificate status inquiries. First, such inquiries may come from any user and concern any client. Hence, every CA server in the system must be able to determine the certificate status for every client of the CA. Second, certificate status queries from the client multiply the query processing costs of the CA. If each of N clients queries the status of 10 other clients each day, the CA must process 10N queries. Third, nonclient queries are undesirable from a business model perspective. It is unclear, economically, how the CA should handle queries from non-clients. Finally, as mentioned above, if the CA must respond to queries from non-clients, it becomes more susceptible to DoS attacks.
Identity-based cryptosystems eliminate third-party queries. Identity-based cryptosystems are public key cryptosystems in which the public key of a user derives from the user's identity (name, address, email address, IP address, etc.). A trusted third party generates a user's private key using the user's identity and a master secret held by the trusted third party. In such a system, a first user can encrypt a message to the second user without obtaining explicit information other than the second user's identifying information and parameters of the second user's CA. The second user can decrypt the message only if that user has received an updated private key from its CA.
The concept of an identity-based cryptosystem was proposed in A. Shamir, Identity-Based Cryptosystems and Signatures Schemes, ADVANCES IN CRYPTOGRAPHY—CRYPTO '84, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 196 (1984), Springer, 47-53. However, practical identity-based encryption schemes have not been found until recently. For instance, identity-based schemes were proposed in C. Cocks, An Identity-Based Encryption Scheme Based on Quadratic Residues, available at h-t-t-p://www.cesg.gov.uk/technology/id-pkc/media/ciren.pdf; D. Boneh, M. Franklin, Identity Based Encryption from the Well Pairing, ADVANCES IN CRYPTOLOGY—CRYPTO 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2139 (2001), Springer, 213-229; and D. Boneh, M. Franklin, Identity Based Encryption from the Well Pairing (extended version), available at h-t-t-p://www.cs.stanford.edu/˜dabo/papers/ibe.pdf. Cocks' scheme is based on the “Quadratic Residuosity Problem,” and although encryption and decryption are reasonably fast (about the speed of RSA), there is significant message expansion (i.e., the bit-length of the ciphertext is many times the bit-length of the plaintext). The Boneh-Franklin scheme bases its security on the “Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Problem,” and it is quite fast and efficient when using Weil or Tate pairings on supersingular elliptic curves or abelian varieties.
Existing identity-based cryptosystems, however, have had only limited acceptance. One major reason for this is that these systems involve key escrow. The CA knows all secrets in the cryptosystem because it generates the private keys of all users. As a result, existing identity-based cryptosystems have been vulnerable to passive attacks in which the CA, or any other party that discovers the master secret can determine shared secret of the two users.
There is a need for an efficient scheme allowing a recipient user of a cryptosystem to decrypt a secret message from a message sender only when a trusted third party certifies that the recipient holds a valid private key. Ideally, such a scheme should not require that the message sender query another party, including the third party, as to the status of the recipient's private key. Neither should such a scheme have the disadvantage of third party key escrow.
It therefore is an object of the present invention to provide an efficient protocol, not involving key status queries or key escrow, wherein a message recipient can decrypt a message from a message sender only if the recipient obtains authorization (e.g. up to date certification) from a third party. It is a further object of the present invention to provide such a protocol wherein the recipient's decryption ability is contingent upon authorization by several parties. Another object of the present invention is to provide such a protocol wherein the third party comprises a hierarchical authorization entity within the cryptosystem. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide an efficient method of providing a user with a private key having a short validity period. It is a further object of the invention to provide such a protocol that allows such communication in a system comprising a large number (e.g. millions) of users.